Albums

Albums Overview

Albums are collections of photos, videos and other albums. There are three types of albums:

• standard albums
• shared albums
• smart albums

Standard albums are simply directories within the Synology storage volume used by PhotoStation. Any photo, video or album within a directory will be associated with the album of that directory.

Shared albums are albums that have been deliberately shared with the public. These albums are accessible via a public shared link that can then be sent to friends, posted on social media or otherwise shared with people who do not have direct access to the Synology NAS.

Smart albums are dynamic collections of photos and videos based on various user-defined filters. For example, a smart album could be created to collect all photos taken in a specific year or having a particular tag. Photos and videos in smart albums remain stored in their original standard album.

Album Permission Types

Each standard album can have one of the following permission types:

• public
• private
• password

Public albums are viewable by anyone with access to the Synology PhotoStation GUI. With respect to API access, these can be seen without requiring authentication. These are not the same as shared albums which are accessible via the internet via a special shared link.

Private albums are only viewable by specific users (by default the owner and any administrator users). Additional users can be granted permission to these albums separately (see below).

Password albums are accessible to all users (without user-level authentication) but have album-specific password that must be entered to view.

NOTE: Only albums in the PhotoStation root or with an immediate parent in the PhotoStation root (ie. second level albums) can have permission types set. Any albums below the second level will inherit their permission model from their parent.

Album User Privileges

Beyond the permission types mentioned above, each album can has a set of specific privileges that can be enabled or disabled on a user or group basis:

• Browse
• Upload
• Manage

Users with “Browse” privilege will be able to view photos in private albums they do not own (they will already be able to view public albums).

Users with “Upload” privilege can upload new photos or videos to the album.

Users with “Manage” privilege can perform most operation on photos and albums including editing metadata, etc…

Users in the DSM administrator group will automatically have all privileges for all albums in PhotoStation.

Download Privileges

By default, even users with “Browse” access to an album will not see any button to download the original image or video file. There is PhotoStation global setting that will allow all users to download any file they have viewing permissions for.